The United States Ranks Near the Top in the World Bank’s Doing Business Index

I’m mostly negative about organizations such as the IMF, World Bank, UN, and OECD. In part this is because they are a very expensive burden on taxpayers, but also because they generally push for bad policy.

One very good source of data from an international bureaucracy is the Doing Business Index, published each year by the World Bank. As you can see from the image (click to enlarge), the United States does relatively well in this ranking.

The one area where the U.S. gets a very poor score, though, is in the “paying taxes” category. This is yet another reason why we should junk the corrupt internal revenue code and replace it with a simple and fair flat tax.

[…] which means they can be fired without reason (this is one of the reasons the United States is near the top in the World Bank’s Doing Business ranking. In government, by contrast, slackers, trouble […]

There may be a few suspicious columns which need clarification, like the “Getting Electricity”. If by that term one means “Regulatory freedom to bring electricity to your business” then ok. But I suspect it perhaps means “Taxpayer obligation to provide electricity access to your business”. The former would be an enhancer to overall economic freedom and free enterprise efficiency while the latter a detriment, since the “unseen” economic coercion of bringing electricity to your business more than negates the “seen” benefit of getting the electricity. I am sure that both Europe and the US would score pretty high in the “Index of doing Solyndra style business” (– at the disproportionate detrimental effect to overall aggregate economic activity).

That is why I prefer overall indexes like economic freedom — those are indexes tht better correlate with higher growth rates — the only long term determinant of sustainable prosperity.